Vin blinked at the dwarf’s bluntness, not expecting him to come right out and ask. He didn’t want to stereotype based on the few dwarves he’d had the pleasure of interacting with so far, but he was beginning to get the sense that dwarves in general just weren’t huge fans of pointless small talk.

  “I’m Vin, a human Explorer from a few fragments away,” he explained, quickly going around the table and introducing the rest of them in a similar manner. “As to why we’re here…” He shrugged, deciding to be just as blunt as the dwarf he was talking to. “Three reasons. To let you know what happened to Vaghel and Turmal, finish their escort mission for them, and acquire a new weapon for our friend.”

  “Well, allow me to start with giving you a proper thank you for bringing us closure regarding the Stoneshaker brothers,” Nohral said, bowing his head and offering an oddly guttural grunt that Vin could only assume was symbolic somehow. “As to the part about finishing out their mission for them, would you mind explaining what you mean by that? We read the journal of course, but I still don’t fully understand how this being came to be under the brothers’ protection,” Nohral said, gesturing toward the trogum.

  “Not much to it honestly,” Vin shrugged. “There’s a civil war going on in one of the fragments neighboring yours, and when Vaghel offered to take one of their people away to safety, this one volunteered. Then they were attacked on their way back to the Crater, and the brothers died while their charge survived. We found it in something of a stunned state, so if we hadn’t stumbled upon him, he probably would have been eaten by a monster sooner or later.”

  “But why did it want to come here in the first place?” Nohral asked, looking curiously at the trogum.

  Ever since entering the room, the trogum had been staring at one of the walls, not moving a single muscle as if deep in concentration. Glancing at it, only now did Vin realize that the trogum had somehow tracked exactly where the lake of lava within the Crater flowed, and was still staring directly toward it as if there weren’t dozens of buildings in the way.

  “These beings… the trogums… most of them aren’t quite as smart as you or I,” Vin admitted, deciding to just come out with it. If it was going to stay here with the dwarves, they’d find out sooner than later anyway. “This one calls itself, The One That Paints In Red. Each of them seem to have a very specific thing that they latch onto as part of their identity. This one is obsessed with the color red, so when it heard Vaghel talk about the lava flowing in the center of your town, it jumped at the opportunity.”

  “How fascinating,” Nohral muttered, carefully opening the heavy tome before him and flipping through page after page. “Trogum you say? We definitely don’t have any records of them in our books, but that’s not saying too much. Most of our records were held within the Pillars themselves,” he sighed, frowning at the thought. “The sheer amount of knowledge lost…”

  Clearing his throat, Vin offered the leader a sincere smile, realizing he might have found a golden opportunity to earn some goodwill. “Actually if you’d like, there is a fragment not too far from here that contains a massive library. If it’s information you need, I could draw you a map to it.”

  Nohral chuckled, closing the book and giving Vin an embarrassed look. “We dwarves don’t really do much travelling, if I’m being honest. Except for the occasional unique individual, like young Vaghel, we prefer to stay here in the Crater where it’s safe.”

  “What do you even eat down here?” Alka couldn’t help but ask. “I haven’t seen so much as a speck of dirt since we’ve come down from the rim. Even those flowers you have outside look like they're growing straight out of the rock.”

  “We have plenty of farms where we grow livestock,” Nohral said, taking advantage of Alka’s question to examine her more carefully. “And we make plenty of mineral chips as well of course.”

  “Wait, what?” Scule asked, reaching over his shoulder and pulling from his cape one of the iron chips he’d grabbed from the brothers’ pack. “Are you talking about these? You mean this isn’t some type of currency?”

  “Not at all,” Nohral chuckled, holding out a hand. Curious, Scule tossed him the chip. In one smooth motion, the leader snagged it out of the air and popped it into his mouth, crunching down on the metal. Vin and his group stared at the dwarf as his thick teeth made short work of the metal chip, pulverizing it into little bits before swallowing.

  “Hmm... Whichever brother that one came from had a rather bland pallet,” he said, smacking his lips together. “Personally, I prefer my chips with a little copper in them. Much tangier.”

  Scule stared at the dwarf in shock, and Vin was right there next to him, already desperate to get a moment alone to write down his new findings about dwarves in his journal.

  “Anyway, suffice to say, none of us will be leaving anytime soon to check out this library,” Nohral admitted, his focus going back to Vin. It would seem the dwarf had pegged him as the leader of their small group. “Though I appreciate you trying to help us. As for the… trogum, was it? I don’t exactly have any issue with it staying with us I suppose. Especially if that was the Stoneshaker brothers’ last wish. So long as it does its part to better the community, I can find a place for it to stay and food to eat.”

  “It doesn’t eat metal,” Vin quickly added, a quick image of the trogum choking on a large hunk of iron as a bunch of dwarves cheered it on flashing through his head.

  “I figured as much,” Nohral chuckled. “Don’t worry about its lower intelligence, I’ll have some of our Nursers assist with finding out what it needs.”

  “Great!” Vin said, only feeling slightly guilty at how happy he was to have officially handed off the trogum. Two down…

  “Now then, about your final reason for coming here…” Nohral began, tapping a finger against the table. “…I’m sorry to say, but we can’t help you regarding your search for a weapon.”

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  “What?!” Alka shouted, getting to her feet and looming over the dwarf. “What do you mean you can’t help us? We had like a hundred different smiths following us all the way here! Surely one of them can spare a few hours!”

  Vin didn’t miss how the dwarven woman’s hand shifted slightly to rest on the handle of her mace, as if she were just waiting for a reason to use it. Thankfully, Nohral seemed completely unshaken by Alka’s outburst, even going so far as to offer the golem an apologetic smile.

  “Again, I’m sorry… But it’s not a matter of availability. The entire reason our ancestors fled civilization and founded Valdora in the first place was to remove ourselves from the near constant wars brewing between nations. Our people’s smithing skills were renown across the land, and we often found ourselves forced to provide weapons for one side or another regardless of whether we wanted to or not. Ever since we put all that conflict behind us, we swore not to place any of our creations into the hands of outsiders, and we’ve upheld that rule for centuries now.”

  Vin groaned, leaning back in his chair and rubbing his face as he realized they’d come all this way largely for nothing. Obviously they’d done the right thing bringing news of the brothers back to their people and escorting the trogum, but they needed to get Alka a new weapon if they wanted to stand a chance against the divine warrior. And a good weapon at that.

  “Is there really nothing we can do to get you to reconsider?” Shia tried, a slight frown on her face. “Some sort of deal we can strike, or an exception to the rule?”

  “Well, there is one exception,” Nohral said, tilting his head as if he’d only just remembered it. “I don’t suppose any of you are a Hero, are you?”

  The five of them stared at the dwarf, as if none could quite believe what they were hearing. After a few seconds of silence, Scule spoke up.

  “…Yes?”

  Vin didn’t even need to look back to recognize the sound of Reginald’s tail smacking into the back of the petian’s head. Leaning forward, he asked what he figured they were all thinking.

  “Why would one of us being a Hero make a difference?”

  “It’s the one exception our ancestors wrote into the rules,” the dwarf shrugged. “Funny enough it’s actually come into play three separate times since the founding of Valdora. Well, eight people have found us and claimed to be Heroes over the centuries, but only three of them actually survived the trial.”

  There goes that idea. Knowing how weirdly durable Alka’s new body was, Vin briefly contemplated lying and claiming the Slayer was some sort of Hero, but it was too big of a risk to take. She hadn’t even had her new body a full twenty-four hours at this point, and there was just too much they didn’t know.

  “Like I said, my hands are tied,” Nohral repeated. “Though as thanks for bringing back news of the Stoneshaker brothers we’ll put you up for the night, and in the mor-”

  At that moment the door slammed open, cutting Nohral off and startling the rest of them. Without even being conscious of it, Vin realized he’d whipped out his staff and dropped into a defensive stance at the sudden noise, all his hours of training with Alka finally paying off. He wasn’t the only one either, as each one of his companions had also readied themselves the moment the door blew open.

  Rather than some sort of monster or deranged divine class holder however, standing on the other side of the very much cracked door was a fairly irate looking dwarf.

  With literal lava pouring down his legs.

  “Nohral!” He shouted, stomping into the room and setting half of the metal table legs on fire as lava dripped off him and began pooling across the floor. Vin and his companions quickly shifted over to the other half of the room, not wanting to get anywhere near the dwarf that seemed entirely unfazed by the lava flowing off him. “What kind of utter ashflow is this?! You’re meeting with a golem of all things, and you didn’t think to tell me?!”

  The shouting dwarf was short, even by dwarven standards. Unlike the rest of the smiths, rather than a leather apron, he seemed to be wearing some sort of armor made from a crumbling dark rock. He had horrific burn scars running down the right half of his body, to the point where it looked like a quarter of his skin had been melted off and poorly regrown. Even still, that didn’t stop the dwarf from thrusting a hardened finger directly at the nervous leader who looked positively terrified.

  “Deorer,” Nohral gulped, the curious and calm dwarf nowhere to be seen as he lifted his legs and tried to keep himself from getting too close to the lava slowly making its way out across the floor. Even the unshakable armored woman standing behind him had taken a few steps back, her face paling as if she’d been in this situation before and didn’t like how it tended to end. “You know you can’t enter the buildings before cooling off! It’s a hazard to-”

  “Shove it up your crater, Nohral, I don’t give a damn,” Deorer grunted, turning to look at Alka. His eyes briefly swept over the rest of them, lingering on Vin for just a moment before he focused on the golem. “You!” He barked, his finger swinging toward the Slayer instead. “Come with me. I won’t damage you or anything, I just want to take a look at how you work and what you’re made out of.”

  Alka stared at the commanding dwarf that the leader and warrior woman were clearly terrified of. Her glowing eyes seemed to flicker for a moment, as if she’d blinked in shock. After a few seconds, she spoke.

  “Will you make me a sword if I come with you?”

  “Eh? Sure, why not,” he grunted, shrugging his shoulders.

  “Deorer!” Nohral finally shouted, seeming to regain some color in his face. “You can’t make her a weapon! You know the rules!”

  The fact that the leader currently had his legs pulled up onto his chair and was hugging them to keep them away from the lava detracted from his commanding tone just a bit, but Deorer did stop and stare at him.

  Grunting, he reached down and grabbed a handful of lava. Before Vin could even blink, he lobbed it directly at Alka, hitting her right in the chest and splashing lava everywhere.

  Through some miracle the rest of them managed to dodge out of the way fast enough to avoid the fiery droplets, and by the time Vin looked up, horrified by what he might find, he was instead startled to see Alka standing there completely unharmed. Whatever her strange marble body was made out of, it looked like it was in fact completely lava proof.

  “Congrats, Hero, you passed the trial,” Deorer drawled, turning and walking out of the room without sparing Nohral another glance.

  “Let’s go make you a sword.”

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